Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South

Engines of Redemption

R. SCOTT HUFFARD JR.

Engines of Redemption

Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Huffard, R. Scott, Jr., author.

Title: Engines of redemption : railroads and the reconstruction of capitalism in the New South / R. Scott Huffard Jr.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004397 | ISBN 9781469652801 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469652818 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469652825 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Railroads—Southern States—History—19th century. | Capitalism—Southern States—History—19th century. | Southern States— Economic conditions—19th century. | Southern States—Race relations— History—19th century.

Classification: LCC HE2761 .H84 2019 | DDC 385.0976/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004397

Cover illustrations: (Front) Thomas Nast, Our Standard (Gauge) Adopted All Over the Union (courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102101); (back) William Jasper Stimson, Train Wreck of Bostian Bridge, Iredell County, N.C., 27 August 1891 (courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina, N.88.9.12).

Portions of this book were previously published in a different form. Chapter 4 appeared as Infected Rails: Yellow Fever and Southern Railroads, Journal of Southern History 79, no. 1 (February 2013): 79–113. Portions of chapter 5 appeared in Ghosts, Wreckers, and Rotten Ties: The 1891 Train Wreck at Bostian’s Bridge, Southern Cultures 20, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 25–39. All material is used here with permission.

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: A System Grand and Harmonious

Part I

Casting the Spell

CHAPTER ONE

Reunited with Bands of Iron

CHAPTER TWO

The Phantasmagoria of the Rail

CHAPTER THREE

Conjure the Railroad

Part II

To the Netherworld

CHAPTER FOUR

Flight of the Yellow-Winged Monster

CHAPTER FIVE

Damnable Conspiracies

CHAPTER SIX

Ubiquitous, Promiscuous, Frequent, and Numerous

CHAPTER SEVEN

Fighting the Octopus

Conclusion: A Procession of Spectres

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Graph

FIGURES

1  A yellow fever refugee train escaping Jacksonville   124

2  A shotgun quarantine confronts Jacksonville residents fleeing a yellow fever epidemic   125

3  The wreckage of a train derailment on Bostian Bridge in Statesville, North Carolina   136

4  Ruins of a train wreck in Cahaba River, near Blocton, Alabama   137

5  Medicine advertisement referencing the fear of train wreckers from the Raleigh News-Observer   159

6  Shoe advertisement featuring imagery of train robbers and wreckers in the Atlanta Constitution   160

7  Southern Railway system map (1895)   206

8  Raleigh News-Observer cartoon depicting African American troops traveling on the A&NC RR   228

9  Tom Watson’s Magazine critiques the carnage on Samuel Spencer’s Southern Railway   233

GRAPH

1  Train-wrecking attempts   155

Acknowledgments

Like a rambling rail car, this book has been moving down main lines and unwanted sidetrack diversions for almost a decade now. When I was an undergrad, the outstanding history faculty at Penn State first stoked my interest in the nineteenth century, and this book had its origins in a number of graduate seminars at the University of Florida. I am grateful to my many wonderful professors I found in Gainesville. My advisor Sean Adams encouraged me as my interests shifted from coal mining to railroads and capitalism, and I am grateful for how he always pushed me to aim high with my research. I was lucky to find a committee that both sustained my project’s grounding in the U.S. South and prodded me to look at the bigger picture. It is probably Bill Link’s fault that I ended up as a southern historian, and the first piece of this project was born in one of his southern history research seminars. His friendship and the robust southern history cohort he built at Florida (and his weekly racquetball matches) served as excellent motivators as I found my way in this profession. Paul Ortiz always pushed me to consider labor history and first pointed me toward the fascinating story of Railroad Bill. Sheryl Kroen was enthusiastic about the project from the start, and she helped pull the project in interesting directions and to draw comparisons between the South’s experience with capitalism and that of France and Europe. Pamela Gilbert’s feedback similarly reminded me of the importance of the railroad in Victorian England.

I consider myself lucky to have worked with such a strong cohort at the University of Florida. When I arrived in Gainesville as a fresh-faced young graduate student, older students quickly took me under their wings, and I would like to think this spirit of collegiality and cooperation continued throughout my time there. Formal and informal conversations with graduate students in seminars and in less distinguished venues like the Salty Dog and the Top were also invaluable. Gainesville was an exciting place to spend my grad school years, and I am grateful for the camaraderie from friends like Mike Brandon, Angela Diaz, Jim Broomall, Ben Miller, Jessica Taylor, Matt Hall, Tim Fritz, Clay Cooper, Scott McPherson, Allison Fredette, and more, as we cheered on the high-flying Gator football team (and drew inspiration from Tim Tebow’s 2008 Promise Speech), explored scuzzy punk shows downtown, biked on old rail trails, and sampled offerings from the city’s burgeoning craft beer scene.

I would also like to thank my current institution, Lees-McRae College, both for providing me with a rewarding and exciting position in the Blue Ridge Mountains and for the professional development support to help get this book over the finish line. Teaching a wide range of courses here has certainly improved the manuscript, and though students in my classes are probably all tired of hearing me talk about railroads, they have influenced this final product more than they know. As I worked to adjust to my new role as an assistant professor, my division chair, Ken Craig, and colleague Michael Joslin were excellent mentors and guides. Working with colleagues like Robert Turpin, Kevin Keck, and Matthew Wimberley, who all have been active in writing and publishing works of their own, has also provided a fertile atmosphere for my research activities.

Institutional support from a wide range of venues has been critical. Research grants from the Newberry Library, North Caroliniana Society, Filson Historical Society, University of Florida History Graduate Society, and University of Florida History Department all helped provide the financial support to complete the necessary archival research for this project. Though time in the archives is, by its nature, a solitary endeavor, I would like to thank companions on the road and those who have given me a place to crash while researching, or who at least served as helpful local guides for when the archive closed. In particular, Blake Renfro, Melissa Houle, Mike Brandon, and Jim Broomall helped provide housing during trips. Of course, this project would not be complete without the often-invisible labors of many others. The staff at countless libraries and archives have been welcoming and helpful, and baristas at the coffee shops I have haunted—from Volta in Gainesville to Espresso News and Mountain Grounds in western North Carolina—witnessed the writing and revision of much of this manuscript, and I am grateful for the writing space and caffeine their shops have provided.

This work is much stronger due to the engagement with my work from a wide range of scholars, and I am appreciative of the input from many sources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a welcoming home for this project. My editor, Chuck Grench, has been excited about this project from the start. He and his staff have been outstanding in showing this first-time author the ropes. The revision process has produced a much stronger manuscript, and I am thankful for the substantive critiques and feedback from the two anonymous readers. Feedback from the audience at meetings of organizations like the Business History Conference, Southern Historical Association, Southern Industrialization Project, and Harvard Conference on the History of Capitalism helped sharpen my analysis at critical points in my writing. Perhaps even more invaluable are the friendships and informal connections I have made across the historical profession. I am thankful for conference friends like Matt Stanley, Judkin Browning, Bob Hutton, Angela Riotto, and countless others. People who have read and commented on various parts of the project in either formal or informal venues helped guide and shape the final product. Many have seen parts or portions of this book, but I would especially like to thank Scott Reynolds Nelson, Paul M. Renfro, Kate Jewell, Matthew Wimberley, Robert Turpin, and the scholars who volunteered their time and energies for the Business History Dissertation Colloquium.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without the backing my family has provided me. My parents encouraged me to follow my interests and to pursue graduate school and this career in the first place, and their support has been invaluable.

Abbreviations

A&F

Atlanta & Florida Railroad

A&NC

Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad

C&O

Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad

CF&YV

Cape Fear & Yadkin Valley Railroad

GS&F

Georgia Southern & Florida Railroad

IC

Illinois Central Railroad

L&N

Louisville & Nashville Railroad

NOStL&C

New Orleans, St. Louis and Chicago Railroad

NC RR

North Carolina Railroad

PRR

Pennsylvania Railroad

R&D

Richmond & Danville Railroad

SRSC

Southern Railway Security Company

V&M

Vicksburg & Meridian Railroad

Engines of Redemption

Introduction

A System Grand and Harmonious

Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent.

—Walt Whitman, To a Locomotive in Winter

The train lurched forward. Bells clanged, and the engine gained momentum, roaring out of the station into the dark and dreary Louisiana night. The passengers slumbering in the trailing cars could only dream of what transpired in the cab of the engine, where Hunt McCaleb, a journalist and self-described amateur, had climbed aboard for a brief glimpse of the life of an engineer. The midnight mail train was soon flying along the 200-mile route between Meridian and New Orleans. The speed of the train hit sixty miles per hour, and conversation between the three men in the cab died. Out the window, McCaleb could see dense forests, interspersed with water tanks, lonely way stations, red and white signal lights, and the other usual landmarks of a rail corridor fly by. Struck by the sublimity of the moment, McCaleb lost control of his emotions and later wrote that he was enchanted with the magic spell that overcomes the uninitiated. No one who has not had the experience can ever realize or appreciate the sensations produced by riding on an engine, he argued. His thrills quickly turned to horrors, though. In his entranced state he had visions of train wreckers galore—criminals who deliberately wrecked trains to exact a grudge—and he recalled the hundred wrecks he has read of caused by the negligence of a sleepy brakeman. With the train hurtling through the dark at such speeds, McCaleb knew there would be no time to brake for obstacles, and he gained new appreciation for the bravery of the nation’s railroad engineers. Finally, the train slowed, and pulled into Meridian ahead of schedule, and as the travel companions departed the cab, the proud engineer patted engine no. 415 with the affection a mother would have for her child.¹

McCaleb’s trip embodied the many processes that helped make the New South simultaneously exhilarating and horrifying. But at the time of this journey in 1892, there was nothing unique about the route on which he rode. Every night, trains rumbled down this track, carrying mail from New Orleans to Meridian, and their travels were the culmination of a number of extraordinary historical processes: from the organization of the Queen & Crescent Railroad Company, which joined the financial might of investors from England, New York, and New Orleans, to the careful plotting of the route by surveyors trekking through isolated bayous and swamps, to the backbreaking labor of work crews toiling to grade the road and lay down rails and ties, and finally to the engineering and construction work behind the steam-powered engine that could hit unrivaled speeds. The line was but one link in a network of iron rails that connected the Crescent City to Cincinnati and to northern cities far beyond. McCaleb dashed through the night thanks to pooled investments of capital, the managerial structures of the modern corporation, the labor of workers, coal-powered energy, and industrialized production. McCaleb’s journey was more than just a train ride—it was the most direct contact imaginable with late-nineteenth-century capitalism.²

In the form of the railroad, the forces of capitalism that generated McCaleb’s thrills transformed the entire South in the decades after the Civil War. The railroad was by no means new at this point. The technology arrived early in the region when South Carolina completed one of the nation’s first lines in the 1820s, and a burst of construction in the 1850s integrated the region on the eve of secession.³ But the slave economy had placed limits on the transformative power of the railroad in this era. Railroads built in the antebellum era were typically harnessed to local economic goals, and they lacked the systemic vision of later companies. State governments, and not private corporations, directly funded many of these lines. Gauges varied wildly from state to state, vast pockets of the South lacked any rail connections, and the region lagged behind the mileage of the North.⁴ After Civil War and Reconstruction came a railroad revival, and from 1880 to 1890, the mileage of southern railroads almost doubled from 14,778 to 29,263, as the network grew at a rate that outpaced the rest of the nation’s lines. By 1890, nine out of every ten southerners lived in a county with a railroad. These lines plugged the substantial gaps in the antebellum network, connecting once-isolated corners of the South to the world of the railroad. Along with adding new mileage, work crews improved already existing lines by speeding up service, matching gauges to northern standards, and fully integrating southern railroads to large national systems backed by northern and global capital. Consolidation inevitably followed expansion, and by the turn of the century, large corporations like the Illinois Central, Southern Railway, and Louisville & Nashville controlled the bulk of southern rail lines.⁵ In 1880, Henry Grady was well on his way to becoming the unofficial spokesman for the New South when he marveled that a system grand and harmonious was coming into form, and indeed, few aspects of southern life would remain untouched by the growing rail network.⁶

The story of this railroad boom and the New South’s transformation has often been told in sheer economic terms, by historians who tabulate numbers of railroad mileage, figures of economic growth, wage levels, freight rate fluctuations, and other numerical metrics. The new connections encouraged the growth of a southern manufacturing sector, based largely on textiles and steel, and encouraged extractive industries like coal and timber. The expanded network reoriented the geography of trade, dispersing business to country stores, channeling commerce away from ports to interior rail centers like Atlanta, and supplanting the primacy of rivers and steamboats. As Yankee capital and expertise fostered extractive industries that exploited southern raw materials, railroads bound the South to the North in a semicolonial relationship, and they tied southern farmers’ fates even more closely to the whims of global markets. Railroads brought the modern corporation to the South—the new conglomerates like the Southern Railway were the largest companies the region had ever seen.⁷

Southern railroads also have played a starring role in histories of New South race relations and the onset of Jim Crow. Most famously, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that enshrined the separate but equal doctrine that underpinned decades of segregation, was based on a legal challenge on a New Orleans rail line. Rail travel jumbled together southerners of different races and classes in intimate quarters, and these new railroads became critical sites of contestation. To codify the emerging customs of segregation on the ground, white southerners moved to segregate rail cars in a wave of new legislation in the 1880s and ’90s. Scholars tracing the advance of segregation as a culture, as custom, and as a legal reality, and those following black resistance and protest against these laws, thus place heavy focus on the shifting developments in southern rail cars, which were the leading edge of the region-wide push for Jim Crow.⁸ At least in the 1890s, this is typically a story of declension, ending in de jure segregation and the nadir of American race relations, but the railroad also played a key role in African American resistance and racial uplift. For black southerners, railroads were more than just sites of oppression and protest. They were also means of escape and empowering mobility, conduits for the Great Migration, providers of secure middle-class jobs, and inspirations for music and other forms of expression.⁹

These two approaches to the New South railroad—as a revolutionary agent of economic change and the prime battleground for racial conflict and segregation—provide points of departure for the two new tracks we explore in Engines of Redemption. First of all, Engines of Redemption moves beyond the rail car to analyze the New South’s railroads as a cohesive network—Grady’s grand and harmonious system—that integrated and connected the South through a capitalist means. Passenger travel was important, but southerners also experienced the railroad as a system, an interconnected network of rapid circulation that was something new and distinct from what came before it. This network was more than just a means of travel; it was a conveyor of disease, a target of violent robbers, a force of dramatic change in the countryside, a powerful and monopolistic corporation, and a builder and destroyer of towns. Moreover, a heavy focus on interactions within rail cars obscures larger historical forces at work, the infusion of the energies and motives of capitalism into the region via this railroad network. Decisions that brought railroads to certain areas or towns, policies about freight rates and quarantines, and purchases that could seal a corporation’s fate were made in corporate boardrooms, in newspaper offices, and on Wall Street, and in the prominence of the rail car we have lost sight of the bigger picture and of who pulled the strings that directed the network. Simply put, I interrogate the railroad as a corporate entity and as a structure that directed, constrained, and revolutionized people’s lives, and as way for white and black southerners to directly interact with the forces of capitalism rapidly altering the South and the nation.¹⁰

Second, I examine the railroad as an idea, a symbol, and a narrative device that described the advance of capitalism during a critical turning point for the South and the nation. The railroad’s transformations always meant more than just the cold reckoning of an account book’s ledger, or the staid tally of statistics in a trade journal. When explaining the dominance and persistence of capitalism, one must move beyond economics and turn to the mentalities, mores, and stories told about the system. And as a symbolic harbinger of the forces of industrial capital remaking nineteenth-century life, the railroad was without peer.¹¹ Few moments could match the exuberance of a town welcoming its first locomotive or the adventure of the first rail excursion through what once was wilderness. From the vantage point of a lonely depot, the arrival of a train could symbolize escape, a new beginning, a narrative break, or the glamour of cities and destinations far down the line. Songs romanticizing train travel and the hardships of railroad labor echoed from work camps to recording studios to airwaves far beyond. And in its idealized form, the experience of rail travel—seeing stunning panoramic views, traversing new landscapes, and moving at rapid speeds—fired the imaginations of travelers like few other experiences.¹² As the southern railroad system took shape in the 1880s and ’90s, and as southerners rode the rails, invested capital in new railroad companies, shipped products to far-off destinations, and labored to build rail lines, the railroad came to represent capitalism itself in a way the Iron Horse had not before the Civil War.

Viewing the railroad as a force for connection and as a narrative of capitalist expansion helps us reassess the New South in light of the new, more critical histories of capitalism that have emerged in the past decade. Historians like Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, Joshua Rothman, and Walter Johnson present the antebellum South as a land alive with the energy and turbulence of capitalism. Freewheeling land speculators, riverboat gamblers, and planters on the cotton frontier pushed the region into a central role in global capitalism. After the expropriation of Native peoples and rapid expansion of slavery, plantations in states like Louisiana and Alabama produced cotton that powered mills from Lowell to Lancashire. Developments on capitalism’s periphery of cotton plantations had direct connection to events in the financial and industrial core. Vicious booms and busts, borne of reckless banks and out-of-control speculation in the Old Southwest, roiled the national economy, and the race to produce more cotton on plantations inspired many of industrial capitalism’s innovations in labor management.¹³ As scholars make renewed arguments for the capitalist nature of the Old South, an obvious question that follows is how we are to treat the New South. Do we present the New South as a warped form of capitalist development, a region traveling down a deviant path? Or is it a mere colony, serving up raw materials to the industrial North? And how do we square the various horrors of the New South with the allegedly empowering and democratic nature of capitalism?¹⁴

Many of these arguments about the capitalist nature of the New South economy hinge on definitions of capitalism, or differentiations between various forms of capitalism, but a focus on the railroad allows us to examine the impacts of key elements of capitalism, such as connections, circulation, standardization, rationalization, corporate consolidation, and movement directed by the profit motive. The railroad constitutes capitalism in action, and tracing train stories and interactions with the railroad network allows us to examine capitalism as both an economic system and a culture, and to trace how southerners accommodated to, contested, adopted, and assimilated into the system.¹⁵ Implicit in the denial of capitalism in the Old South was the Cold War–era assumption connecting capitalism to progress, democracy, and equality. If we are to take a more critical view of capitalism, and see the Old South as a site of capitalist disaster, it makes sense to see the New South not as an aberration, but as a function of untrammeled capitalism. Just as the calamities of the Old South can be blamed on global capitalism, the New South was a society pulsating with the powerful and dangerous forces of capitalism via the railroad, and a society in the process of completing a reconstruction of capitalism’s values.¹⁶

The reconstruction of capitalism in the South was necessary, as it is clear that the upheavals of the Civil War and its aftermath decisively recast the region’s role in global capitalism. The violence of war rendered the region’s physical landscape an unruly ruin marked with the charred remnants of factories, fallow farms, twisted and warped iron ties, and plundered plantations. Emancipation wiped out the wealth stored in over four million slaves and ended the slave labor system that had proven so profitable to planters, traders, and industrialists. Observers ranging from Yankee troops to journalists to embittered ex-Confederates recognized that capitalism clearly was not operating the way it had before the war.¹⁷ In the face of brutal resistance, freedmen and freedwomen sought to assert their political rights and secure an economic future for their families and communities, but the transition from enslaved to free wage labor was rocky, and many became mired in sharecropping arrangements that more resembled feudalism. Economic uncertainty dragged into the 1870s, as northern and European investors balked at the region’s political turmoil, and the calamitous Panic of 1873 undid many of the gains of the immediate postwar period. Moreover, the wealth and confidence of the white elite that had once, and would soon again, run the region was in tatters. White men haunted by their crushed dreams of military glory and the ghosts of fallen comrades carried physical scars and bitter resentments toward Yankee occupiers and the newly empowered freedmen. White southerners wrote of a malaise, perpetual stagnation, or gloom that settled over the region. Political redemption of the region by violent white paramilitary groups may have heartened white elites, but it did little to resolve the question of how to rekindle the magic of capitalism in the South.¹⁸

For the self-styled Redeemers who took power after Reconstruction, the path out of this quagmire was along the gleaming steel track of the railroad. The men at the helms of the South’s dozens of new railroads, Bourbon (pro-business redeemer) politicians, small-town boosters, and businessmen aggressively pushing for new connections recognized the power of the Iron Horse. The railroad, the nineteenth century’s quintessential symbol of progress, helped these elites consolidate their power in a region in flux. At regional expositions and local railroad celebrations, and in their travel narratives and rhetoric in pamphlets and newspapers, boosters harnessed this symbolic power of the railroad to support their claims that a New South had risen. In an 1887 pamphlet, booster M. B. Hillyard articulated this link between railroads, capitalism, and regional redemption, arguing that the 14,000 new miles of railroad built since 1880 were proof of development and of the confidence of the capitalists of the civilized world. The logic of confidence in the South’s progress is enunciated in the golden argument of capital, and is voiced in the fierce rhetoric of thunderous and clattering railroad trains, boasted the Manufacturers’ Record in 1890.¹⁹ In hitching their rule to the improved railroad network, these elites also linked the New South to the forces of capitalism. Their narrative was simple: railroads and capital would save the region and complete its recovery from the Civil War.

On the surface, and despite the fact that it came from a minority of the population, this story seemed to hold up, and like other narratives of capitalism, the New South story held real power. It gave legitimacy to the Bourbon conservative white Democratic leadership of the region, and the message of progress beat back systemic critiques from the Populists, the Knights of Labor, and African Americans contesting new segregation regimes.²⁰ It seduced northern politicians and investors, who invested economically in the region but abruptly pulled back from the efforts at social change witnessed during Reconstruction and subsequently left southern politicians to their own devices.²¹ Sectional reconciliation thus took place on terms dictated by the white South, and the New South era saw the rise of new legends about the southern past, from the notion of an Old South filled with moonlight, magnolias, and happy slaves to the interpretation of Reconstruction as an era of corrupt black rule and military occupation.²² The New South story also supported the project of reestablishing white supremacy and of rebuilding the racial order challenged by emancipation and Reconstruction. The railroad revival therefore moved in tandem with horrific racial violence, a surge in lynchings, and legal efforts to institute Jim Crow segregation. Finally, the myth gave outsized power to the ascendant railroad corporations by forestalling serious attempts at regulation or improving conditions for workers.²³

The New South boosters and their northern allies told a compelling story about the railroad, capitalism, and progress, but the inevitable moments of crisis and doubt, like McCaleb’s visions of disaster, raised serious questions and threatened to shatter this nexus. What if the train flying sixty miles per hour through a dark forest was doomed to a fiery wreck? What if the railroad corporation was an agent of chaos, rather than a harbinger of order? And what if capitalism was not the regional savior its boosters made it out to be? Recent histories of capitalism have done more than just highlight the importance of the American South. They have also showed a willingness to engage capitalism’s disasters and more unsavory elements. Financial panics (whether in 1839, 1873, 1929, or 2008), labor exploitation, violent strikes, slave revolts, corporate scandals, corruption, and traumatic enclosures and expropriations mark the history of capitalism, and in a post–Cold War climate, this darker side of the story of American capitalism has come more into focus. Economists like Thomas Piketty suggest that the capitalist system itself is doomed to fail and generate inequalities that threaten to topple the system.²⁴ There is, of course, nothing new about arguments that capitalism is inherently flawed. Observing the exploitation of the working class in the nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted ruin, revolution, and a progression to socialism, and he argued that the bourgeois society had conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. As the spells of the railroad began to unravel and sow chaos, how could the idea of the New South and capitalist progress survive?²⁵

Defenders of capitalism tend to overlook and downplay these disasters, but a selective composition of the story of capitalist expansion was not an accident. Walter Benjamin called this disjuncture between booster visions and historical reality the phantasmagoria of progress. As he argued, the rapid spread of capitalism and new technologies, prime among them the railroad, induced a dream filled sleep, a collective hallucination that obscured the new forms of exploitation and misery produced by these advances of capital. The New South myth certainly constitutes a phantasmagoria, and the defeated white South was especially primed for such a myth, as white men who saw their delusions of military grandeur vanish at Gettysburg or Appomattox were more than ready to seek new glory in the railroading realm. The dream consciousness of capitalism can help explain the persistence of the system in spite of its challenges. The march of progress obliterates the past, as a society is blinded by the phantasmagoria, and society remembers the new rail line, and not its opponents; it honors the rail baron, and not the worker buried in a cave-in or the child hit by a train. In other words, capitalism’s creative destruction did more than just wipe out physical manifestations of the past; it masked a history of contestation that matched its spread.²⁶

Evidence of this phantasmagoria was all over the New South, and to peer behind this curtain, one must examine narratives, mentalities, and encounters with the symbols of progress that accompany capitalism’s perpetual revolutions. Trains were the most prominent symbols of nineteenth-century modernity and a tangible manifestation of the spread of capitalism, so train stories like McCaleb’s and the more cohesive tale of the New South boosters are narratives of Capitalism, the self-writing history of the age. In part I of this book, we construct this phantasmagoria and piece together the ways white and black southerners tried to harness the magic of the railroad. Chapter 1 addresses the genealogy of the link between railroads, capitalism and the South’s salvation, beginning with this narrative’s birth from the ashes of the Civil War and tracing it through its connection to the New South movement. For white boosters and Redeemers, the railroad was definitive proof that a New South had risen and the Civil War was in the past. Then chapter 2 begins with a microcosm of the railroad’s transformations, the New Orleans Exposition of 1884, and follows the spread of the values this event promoted. From expositions to small towns across the South, white elites bought into the myth of this event and the untrammeled promise of the railroad, and they extended these railroad dreams into the southern hinterland. Chapter 3 details the struggle between white and black southerners over the empowering magic of the railroad. Black southerners had a railroad progress story of their own, but the story told by white elites was the story that endured thanks to a conscious effort to downplay and circumscribe the role of black southerners as laborers, consumers, and travelers.

This idea that railroad magic would redeem the region was a mirage promulgated by elites and boosters. Walter Benjamin argued that the dream-filled sleep of capitalism’s phantasmagoria led to a reactivation of mythic forces, and again and again, demons—like the imaginary train wreckers that stalked McCaleb—haunted southerners’ encounters with the railroad in the 1880s and ’90s. The appearance of monsters, or of unleashed powers from Marx’s nether world, in the historical record can serve as a convenient sign that something is awry, that a transformation has unleashed a deeper anxiety or a new form of resistance. The men plotting the colonization of the New World conjured up a many-headed hydra to express the multifarious foes, from unruly pirates to rebellious slaves, they marshaled toward their task. The antebellum South had as its bogeymen various forms of real and imagined slave insurrection, a fear that boiled over in a series of panics. The imposing octopus, with tentacles entangling all aspects of political and economic life, came to represent the domination of corporations like the Southern Pacific Railroad and Standard Oil in the development of the West. Even today, twenty-first-century journalists refer to Goldman Sachs and other institutions behind the Great Recession as vampire squids, draining the lifeblood of the national economy.²⁷ Understanding these moments of crisis, when the language of monstrosity, terror, and dark magic appears, is critical if we are to recover the anxieties that accompanied capitalism’s expansion.

While champions of capitalism will argue that these moments of disaster should be ignored in favor of larger metrics of progress and growth, it is in these crises that the inner workings of this complicated system are revealed. A farmer may not fully comprehend the vast web of institutions that hold his debt until the mortgage officer arrives, just as residents of a southern railroad town may only pause to take stock of the extent of their connections when disease or a wanted criminal appears in a town down the line. Moreover, these crises constitute potential turning points, where alternatives to capitalism come into view, and the ways in which capitalism overcomes these challenges and the ways in which the downsides and disasters of capitalism are written out of its history help explain the persistence and dominance of the system. There was nothing natural or preordained about the victory of capitalism, a fact that makes the revolutionary New South period, when the leaders of a defeated region aggressively adopted capitalism’s values, of particular interest.²⁸

Railroad boosters and previous generations of historians have lauded the railroad as a harbinger of order and stability, but the railroad corporation itself was an agent of bedlam. Alfred Chandler set the entire paradigm of the field of business history by arguing that the nature of the railroad corporation pioneered corporate organization and created the invisible hand of the modern corporation’s managerial structures. The advance of the railroad corporation through history then spread rationality and helped structure the chaos of the nineteenth century. Other twentieth-century histories of the railroad portray them as essential colonizers, and they connect rail corporations like the Burlington, Illinois Central, and more to the broader economic development of their regions. The implicit assumption behind these works was that railroads were responsible, even necessary, to build up large portions of the vast country.²⁹ Very often the railroad was a force for stability and positive growth, but the history of the railroad and the narratives in this book demonstrate that the logic of the corporation—to maximize profits, consolidate toward bigness, generate creative destruction, and maximize efficiency—could just as soon lead to chaos. The railroad, heralded as the first big business in history, demonstrated that modernity could be quite disorderly.³⁰

Tracing the tracks of the Iron Horse around the globe reveals a long history of contestation and resistance. Americans lamented the machine in the garden for ruining pastoral landscapes, worried about the role of women in this new public space, and assailed railroad companies for their corruption and grip on the political system. European travelers fretted about murder in compartments and invented new maladies like railway spine, and the imagery of the railroad entered politics in a place like Mexico, where both supporters and opponents of Porfirio Díaz invoked the symbolism of the country’s new railroads. Travel narratives from the height of Japan’s railroad boom spoke to tensions in changing gender roles, the perils of obsessive punctuality, and cultural predispositions to suicide. As apparatuses of imperial empires, railroads took on even darker meanings, increasing the exploitation of resources and Native peoples in Africa, and spreading cholera through India and beyond. If train stories helped to write the global narrative of capitalism’s ascendancy in the late nineteenth century, critiques of railroads spoke to the anxieties of these transitions.³¹

Engines of Redemption extends this global story of railroad and capitalist carnage to the New South, and argues that the railroad was uniquely destructive and problematic in this region. While part I of the narrative creates the railroad phantasmagoria and discusses what this story obscures, in part II we descend to the netherworld, and in a series of case studies, we examine railroad crises that were distinctive to the New South. The very traits lauded by boosters as central to the railroad’s power introduced new dangers and anxieties in southern life. As chapter 4 details, railroads spread yellow fever, a terrifying disease, into new corners of the region and provoked an angry extralegal backlash, the shotgun quarantine. The new southern railroads were built quickly and cheaply and thus crashed at a higher rate than those in the rest of the nation, and chapter 5 argues that this threat led southerners to fear conspiracies of train wrecking. Malicious gangs of criminals seemed to stalk southern rail lines as derailments and collisions surged in the 1890s. Chapter 6 discusses how the anonymity and predictability of the network abetted the crimes of two train robbers, Railroad Bill and Rube Burrow, and in chapter 7 we examine how capitalism’s natural tendency toward consolidation allowed for the ascendance of monopolistic corporations and the arrival of the octopus in the South. Though its backers touted the company’s arrival as further proof of New South progress, a wide range of political foes challenged this consolidation process, and the metaphor of this company as a grasping octopus became common. Though all of these counternarratives share elements of commonality with railroad disasters in other locations, as a whole, this a story that—due to environmental factors, the backdrop of recent war, racial tensions, and the regional position in the national political economy—could only take place in the specific time and place of the American South in the 1880s and ’90s.

From this first thesis on the distinctly pernicious impacts of the railroad on the New South comes the more overarching argument of the book, that railroad companies and their white southern allies exploited the region’s racial tensions to paper over the destructive aspects of capitalism and ensure the survival of the railroad phantasmagoria. The white South first of all circumscribed access to the railroad’s power. For capitalism to be palatable to white southerners, the magical aspects of the system were denied to black southerners. This was an ideological effort, as seen in white accounts that downplayed black contributions, that marginalized black labor, and that divorced black mobility from the purposeful movement of capitalism. Confronted with middle-class black travelers, empowered workers, or respectable black women, whites tried to link these upwardly mobile black men and black women with Old South stereotypes—seeing the Pullman porter as a subservient slave, for example—and tried to harden the color line through Jim Crow legislation demarcating strict black and white divisions in rail travel. White travelers and authors applied the railroad’s magic to African Americans and conjured up new terrifying archetypes